Inching Along

I'd like to continue the speculations on future poetics begun a few days ago. I don't have time today for more than a couple brief notes.

I think I've made some progress, but there's a need for more interrogation.

First, I've suggested how a sense of living tradition could be built on a notion of active reading/affinity - grounded in love, which undergirds a different attitude toward the origins, identity and presence of the poetic voice (different from major strains of postmodern theory and writing).

Such an approach opens up the possibility that literary style and technique might be generated not solely by the chronological succession of the New, or a deterministic notion of innovation, but by anachronistic connections of affinity (what Mandelstam describes as the "opening of the Bergsonian fan" across widely separated eras).

Secondly, and related to this, I've characterized the "poetic word itself" in (Mandelstamian) Acmeist fashion, as the crossing of two strands: time & eternity, nature and grace, such that poetry is the emanation of harmony, or the evidence of the harmonization, of these two spheres.

Yet this theoretical framework is incomplete, and as such it short-changes poetry. How so?

By forcing poetry to bear the burden of what is basically a metaphysical doctrine, one inhibits poetry's freedom, to some extent. Poetry needs to be free in its autonomy, in its capability to be whatever it wants to be. And yet I don't want to surrender the theoretical grounding which this description of the duplex nature of the poetic word provides. How am I going to resolve this?

Let's say that this notion of the Word as grounded in anachronistic affinity is the vertical axis of a broader definition. When we described Modernism as a literary effort to "catch up" with the zeitgeist, we were overly abstract, since we neglected to focus on the "how" (how this was accomplished).

How this was done involved what we might call an effort of circumference. Let's make this the horizontal axis of our poetics. What do we mean by circumference? The modernist innovations in style & technique - grounded to a great extent in poets like Browning and Whitman - vastly expanded the range of both subject-matter and level of diction. Whitman, in a sense, can be understood as Dickinson's coeval : what Dickinson achieved in the realm of compression and metaphysical verticality, Whitman accomplished in the realm of horizontal breadth and openness, of descriptive capaciousness, of literary magnanimity.

What were the modernist and postmodernist long poems, but experiments in capaciousness, in extending the range of what poetry could include? No wonder that, over the last 50 years, the squabbles between traditionalists and experimentalists have been so divisive and continuous: contemporary inclusiveness clashes sharply with longstanding concepts of traditional poetic technique.

Every poet has to find their own center of gravity or path through these differing perspectives. Inclusiveness, taken as a kind of stylistic absolute, leads eventually to a condition of no-style (anything can be called a poem). Tradition, taken as an absolute, leaves no room for either originality or genuine change.

So perhaps we approach a theory of the poem as something autonomous, self-creating, self-defining; open to both empirical and metaphysical meaning & interpretation, but only in the sense of something possible, potential, discoverable (rather than being defined by a higher or exterior meaning). The poem is evidence of creative labor - labor which in itself is a kind of freedom from prior definitions & orientations.

With such an undefined definition, have we come full circle? Are we back where we started, with nothing to show for it? I hope not... For me, anyway, that vertical axis opens at least a possible path beyond both modern & postmodern, while the horizontal axis allows poetry to build on the capacious circumference of its accomplishments.